Ever since the 2013 revelations about mass surveillance, developments like these make it ever more appealing for us to finally take (our private) matters in our own hands. It is in our search for a solution to this that we might start feeling hard-pressed to have our own pair of public and private keys.

Public-key cryptography builds on an extremely uneven situation where encrypting a piece of data is a cinch with the use of the public key, whereas decryption is mind-bogglingly hard unless you happen to possess the associated private key, too.
And although such methods have numerous advantages over simple password encryption (there’s no need here to send a password over the Internet when using it for the very first time), it isn’t entirely without its own quirks.

One of the most annoying features of this approach is that the sheer size and make-up of a private key (pure gibberish, really) rule out the possibility of memorizing it for the most of us. To save the day, we need to store a copy of it somewhere very safe and secure, either literally so, or else by setting it up as a bounty for prospective burglars into our apartment.

Ever since the 2013 revelations about mass surveillance, developments like these make it ever more appealing for us to finally take (our private) matters in our own hands. It is in our search for a solution to this that we might start feeling hard-pressed to have our own pair of public and private keys.

Public-key cryptography builds on an extremely uneven situation where encrypting a piece of data is a cinch with the use of the public key, whereas decryption is mind-bogglingly hard unless you happen to possess the associated private key, too.
And although such methods have numerous advantages over simple password encryption (there’s no need here to send a password over the Internet when using it for the very first time), it isn’t entirely without its own quirks.

One of the most annoying features of this approach is that the sheer size and make-up of a private key (pure gibberish, really) rule out the possibility of memorizing it for the most of us. To save the day, we need to store a copy of it somewhere very safe and secure, either literally so, or else by setting it up as a bounty for prospective burglars into our apartment.